“We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,” Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. “We’re wanting them to function as a machine. . . . We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.”
From a Michael Pollan article in the NY Times Magazine. Sounds very similar to these criticisms of a mobile workforce.
Okay. You’ve got nature—neurons, brain chemicals, hormones, and of course, at the bottom of the cereal box, genes. And then there’s nurture, all those environmental breezes gusting about. And the biggest cliche in this field is how it is meaningless to talk about nature or nurture, only about their interaction. And somehow, that truism rarely sticks. Instead, somebody’s got to go, and when a new gene is trotted out then when “firing off”, “determines” behavior, environmental influences are inevitably seen as something irrelevant that have to go.
From Robert Sapolsky’s article “A Gene for Nothing” in the book Monkeyluv.
The author also notes that the genome is called “code of codes” and the “holy grail” by un-sciency journalists.
I’m taking Mathematical Models in Biology and we had an interesting problem in our last class. We were broken up into groups and asked to create a model around malaria infection. We received some information on mosquito behavior and lifecycles, infection rates and patterns, and effects. That was it.
The primary tenet of mathematical modeling is simplification. We quickly realized that when trying to simplify the process, we needed to know what information we wanted to gain from the model. The standard (and incredibly simple) SIR model, for example, answers the question “how many people will be infected at any one time?”, not necessarily, “how many will recover or die?”.
To put it into mathematical terms, if we’re going to reduce the number of dimensions (by simplifying), we want to make sure that the information we’re left with has useful meaning for the situation.
Which also leads me to thinking about reductionism and holism.
